Sawhey is one of those figures who straddle more boundaries and cross more divides than even the UN Secretary-General. So when we learn that his new album, ‘London Underground’ channels the anxious messages of a post 7/7 Britain into one united voice it shouldn’t come as any surprise. In some way the experience is rather like turning the dial on your old transistor radio and negotiating your way through a wave of jostling voices. Of course, they’re more smoothly segued than most frequencies you’ll come across on the radio, and they might even form something of the ‘collective consciousness’ the press-sheet describes, but the threshing of different thoughts and different feelings is a brave and credible challenge to the natural will of the media to build concensus off the back of violence. The violence that erupted from the carriages at Edgware Road has been equalled blow for blow by the violence we repeat with images and words and depictions of this ‘war’ on television. The fact that Sawhney draws on a prodigious range of influences, from dubstep, Brazilian, trip-hop, folk, flamenco, Asian, bossa, blues and jazz, and makes them sound like echoes of one explosion, is a testament to the diversity of our capital and to the artist who holds that range together. The purr of the record’s exotic rhythms and the gentle strokes of its calm, reflective melodies is a triumph of order over chaos. Sawhney and his guests may wish to destroy the camera that recorded the events that day, but they all clearly aspire to restore the beautiful images it had captured previously.
The album features appearances from Paul McCartney (‘My Soul’), Imogen Heap (‘Bring It Home’), singer and rapper, Natty (‘Days of Fire’), Faheem Mazhar (‘Daybreak’) and Aruba Red (‘Last Train To Midnight’).